The Book of Bodies
AUTHOR
Aleš Šteger
TRANSLATOR
Brian Henry
Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Bodies directly follows—and builds on and veers from—The Book of Things. The 50 poems in The Book of Things focus on such everyday objects as umbrellas, chairs, and candles, and in so doing illuminate the human condition, particularly its propensity for violence, deception, and forgetting. The 50 poems in The Book of Bodies manage to be simultaneously more and less restrictive: half the poems are prose poems (of five paragraphs each) that roam across personal experience, human history (individual and collective), and the natural world to unlock intellectual and emotional connections; the other half are narrow stanza-less poems that focus on a single word. These poems have a sinuous, almost vaporous quality on the page—lines so thin that they serve as a response to the prose that dominates the first half of the book. Both types of poems in The Book of Bodies are essential to Šteger’s understanding of the world.
Reviews
"Esteemed American readers, Ales Steger is the real thing! He is the poet of inimitable gifts! He is one of the best Eastern European poets of his generation! It is the truth: Steger is a marvelous voice, one that takes some of the playfulness of his Yugoslavian compatriots Vasko Popa and Tomaz Salamun to the whole new level."
— Ilya Kaminsky
Brian Henry has published 11 books of poetry, most recently Permanent State (Ahsahta, 2019). His translation of Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 and won the Best Translated Book Award. He also has translated Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices and Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers. His translations have received numerous honors, including an NEA fellowship, a Howard Foundation grant, and a Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences grant.
Aleš Šteger has published seven books of poetry, three novels, and two books of essays. A Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in France and a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, he received the 1998 Veronika Prize for the best Slovenian poetry book, the 1999 Petrarch Prize for young European authors, the 2007 Rožanc Award for the best Slovenian book of essays, and the 2016 International Bienek Prize. His work has been translated into over 15 languages, including Chinese, German, Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, and Spanish. His first collection in English, The Book of Things, appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 and won the Best Translated Book Award.